We recently watched and enjoyed the film “Penguin Bloom”, set in Sydney’s northern beaches, in which the Bloom family “adopt” a stray magpie, which changes their lives – particularly of the mother who had become a paraplegic and, unsurprisingly,
depressed.
We were, however, puzzled at the film’s version of magpie cries. In addition to the well known melodious magpie calls (no problem there), the bird appeared to be making an altogether different call – frequently – which was a series of
short, quite low and to us unrecognisable-from-a-magpie sound. We felt it was almost a grunt.
We realise that birds can and do emit quite a range of different calls, but we’ve never heard a magpie utter these ones!
Has anyone else watched “Penguin Bloom” and, if so, were you convinced of the authenticity of all the calls made by the magpie (which we assume may in fact have been dubbed for the purposes of the film, for which also it’s likely that at
least several different magpies would have been “recruited”).
Kevin and Gwenyth Bray
